Media
and racism in Mandela's rainbow nation. Prime
Time for Tolerance: Journalism and the Challenge of Racism:
International Federation of Journalists World Conference, Bilbao, Spain, May
2 - 4 1997 by
Guy Berger, 1997

One of the challenges in dealing with racism in SA today, from a media point
of view, is to get beyond the all-too-obvious.

As part of the compromises in our political settlement, we have a gentle
alternative to the Nuremburg Trials and other war crimes tribunal. Our process
is taking place under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu, and is called -
with an unusual combination of words - the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
or TRC. The process is rather controversial: it promises amnesty to perpetrators
of gross human rights violations, in exchange for the truth about what they
did. Another, lesser, aspect is to recommend reparations to victims. Many
South Africans are unhappy that there is not retribution, that reconciliation
is required without full justice being done.

The media is a major part of the process not simply from its own point
of interest in reporting the extremely powerful stories emerging. From the
side of the archbishop the media is seen as the way that Truth will be disseminated
and racial reconciliation stimulated in the broader public. How does the
media respond to this challenge?

It was easy in the past: journalists had to take sides. With the end of
apartheid, we thought we could now be journalists first and foremost. Suddenly
we have to wrestle with our role in racial reconciliation. How do we understand
it, and how report on it?

At a workshop of South African journalists in Cape Town earlier this year,
participants were asked to jot down three words they associated with the
term "perpetrator". "Cruel", "powerful" ,
"active agent", said some. Then one journalist read her associations:
"Fat" "white" "man", she said. Nervous laughter
greeted this contribution, as journalists recognised the painful images
she so concretely evoked. Then another journalist chipped in: "I have
seen a fat white man testifying at the truth commission," she said,
"and he had lost a son who was killed in a landmine explosion while
innocently travelling along a rural road". Silence resulted.

As that workshop proceeded, it became clear that the obvious stereotypes
of racial victims and perpetrators are not adequate to tell the full story
of South Africa. One of the perpetrators for instance was a black assassin
named Joe Mamasela, who waded very deep into the dirtiest of tricks, because,
he says, his brother was murdered by the ANC on suspicion of being an informer
for the security police.

The case of victims becoming perpetrators, and resorting to gross human
rights violations, should not surprise any journalist. What is surprising,
however, is that - contrary to white fears - black South Africans en masse
have not become new racists towards their erstwhile oppressors. Yet there
are still big differences - broadly speaking - between white and black attitudes
to the truth and reconciliation process. Whites are keen to have the past
forgotten and forgiven. White journalists express concern that the story
is getting tired. Not so with black journalists. Black people want to know
the extent of what happened, to tell their stories publicly, and to have
the symbolic affirmation of news worthiness of what happened to them. For
the formerly white media to publish such stories constitutes due recognition,
at last, for many black people, even if the lack of broader social retribution
and redress remains a sore point. Unsurprisingly, black South Africans are
keen to stress reparation and justice, whites emphasise amnesty. The differences
translate into media consumption too: whites generally ignore the premier
TV programme on the proceedings, but they did watch - in huge numbers -
a documentary titled "Prime Evil" about Eugene de Kock, the now-jailed
commander of the police undercover hit squad base, Vlakplaas, who has dozens
of deaths on his account.

All this means that the challenge for journalists is to report the whole
process for the whole society, to find points of entry for the different
race groups, and to try and take them to the whole multifaceted, multi-racial
story from there.

So, there is this substantial communication challenge in understanding
and reporting racial reconciliation - getting beyond the stereotypes and
the racial divisions. But there is also the question of journalists' moral
stand towards such an enterprise. For the media is not simply a bystander
in this whole process. It has a history. And even though few journalists
see a connection, there is a strong link between how journalists covered
(or did not cover) racism and gross human rights violations in the past,
and how they are responding now.

It is thus not only a matter of how to represent today the victims and
the perpetrators of the past, in all their complexity. The question for
South African journalists now is also to assess whether the media itself
was a victim of a racist regime, or a perpetrator of racism. Why is this
important as a question? Because journalists are happy to go along with
the Truth Commission, as far as reflecting Truth goes, but are unsure about
what way to go when they consider the signpost of Reconciliation. If the
media was a villain in terms of racial division, does it now carry a responsibility
for reconciliation and reparations? If it was a victim, should it proactively
try to put an end to such a social sickness? The past has a profound bearing
on the present.

To be more than a journalist - to be a South African journalist specifically
- demands a major decision. The decision is whether you support and promote
racial reconciliation (and in the particular form proposed by the Truth
Commission) - and what this might mean for your journalism. What if some
parts of the truth are so horrendous that they actually undercut chances
for reconciliation? Or if criticism of the TRC, or scooping the identities
of secret witnesses, will undermine the effectivity of the process? So it
is a complex issue, and it is influenced by how you see (and even by how
you don't see) the role of journalism in the past - victim or perpetrator,
and how that impacts on self-definitions today.

Evaluating whether the media was a victim or a villain under apartheid
is about as complex as trying to say whether Winnie Mandela, accused to
this day of involvement in a homophobic and political killing of a teenager,
was a victim or a perpetrator.

The broadcast media, at least, is simple: it was a state-owned apparatus,
kept in tight control by a secret society of Afrikaners, military intelligence
operatives, and direct phone calls from the state president himself. It
not only whitewashed white domination, it blackened the black opposition
(to use racist words in the English language!)It is sad, and shortsighted,
therefore that the new SABC leadership has not seen fit to use the TRC process
to probe and publish what went on within Auckland Park in the not-so-old
days.

The print media is much more complex: it combined victim and villain -
often in the same persons. We know that many white journalists supported
the system directly, or tolerated its normality (which of course played
to their advantage and privilege in so many ways).
The worst spied and lied. Many others kow-towed to disinformation, to censorship
or to white reader prejudice. But even amongst those white journalists who
exposed apartheid's cruelties, or who promoted reform in the Afrikaans press,
there was (and still is) often an obliviousness, about the day-to-day white
arrogance and black humiliation in the newsrooms. For black people subjected
to separate toilets and coffee mugs, this was not a minor part of what white
editors did or did not do. It is a painful and integral part of the bigger
picture.

The racism appeared in the news agenda and the political perspective: the
issues addressed were mainly white society ones, and even where black affairs
were touched on, this was from the point of view of bringing these to the
notice of white audiences and the apartheid government. The idea of black
audiences, of political centres outside the white parliament, were off the
mental horizon of many white liberal journalists. White was what was important.

At the level of practice, black journalists were not trusted. They had
their copy changed, were denied training opportunities and treated insensitively
- even by good liberal white colleagues. Dennis Pather, who became in 1996
the second black editor ever to be appointed to a daily paper in South Africa,
recently recalled how his colleagues would go drinking in the pub after
work, and fail to realise that his staying behind was necessitated by the
fact that they went drinking in a bar that, like most (but not all) South
African bars, was for whites only.

A revealing phone-in programme on Johannesburg talk-radio station, 702,
a little while ago, revealed some of the chasm that still exists between
the white journalist's view and the black one.

In the programme, a caller told how she worked in a big department store,
and had a child brought to her, who had become separated from his mother.
She had announced over the loudspeakers that a child had been found, could
the parents come and fetch him? She received no response. After a few repeats
without success, she announced that "a black child" has been found.
The call brought the mother directly. Was this wrong, she asked? Was it
racist to have mentioned race? The radio journalist hosting the show replied
that there was a difference between distinguishing a person on the basis
of colour and discriminating against a person on these grounds.

This response sounded reasonable enough to the caller, and to several subsequent
callers as well. That is, until a black person called the show and commented
that it was noteworthy that the announcer, and the lost child's mother,
would presumably not normally think it significant to mention race when
a white child was found. In South Africa, a child by definition is a priori
white, a black child is black. In other words, white is the norm: in fact
it is a transparent or invisible colour - not even a colour. To be black
is where the difference comes in. This in a country where black is the vast
majority. The sad part about this story is the inability of the white radio
host to comprehend the point at all.

Racism, like sexism, goes very deep. White journalists wrestle with accusations
about the extent of their racism and their response impacts on their perception
of their role today. Black journalists, on the other hand, often seem to
feel the need to remind whites in general and their white colleagues in
particular, of past and present prejudices and white power. Having been
victims much more than white journalists, many are reluctant to accept reconciliation
without redress. The result has been a critical stance of official reconciliation
policy, which has incurred the wrath of Nelson Mandela himself who feels
they fail to appreciate why he made the compromises that left redress only
a small part of the picture. As black people increasingly became preponderant
in journalism, white racism among journalists is diminishing, (although
black languages are still absent in newspapers media with only two small
exceptions).

What to do about the future of the media in racism in South Africa after
the TRC? The political parties have given their answer by placing in the
constitutional bill of rights itself, in clause 1b, a curb on freedom of
expression in the case of hate speech that constitutes incitement to cause
harm. This provision exists in addition to a clause that already provides
for the limitation of any right if such limit is deemed reasonable and justifiable
within a free, open and democratic society based on dignity, equality and
freedom (clause 3b). Already in line with this, we now have a new law controlling
media that is not within the Newspaper Press Union: the Film and Publications
Act which allows for publications to be banned for distribution if they
contain "advocacy of hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion
and which constitute incitement to cause harm."

There is an expectation that additional legislation, based on the International
Convention on the Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination will
be introduced. Is this legislation necessary? Is it not perhaps closing
the stable door after the horse has bolted - or, rather, after the beast
was well and truly banished, as it should have been, with the advent of
democracy? Where does it all lead?

In fact, the legislation has primary significance for the future - and
it could lead to problems for journalists. Not defined in the constitution
or the Film & Publications Act is what constitutes "harm":
is it physical, or also emotional, or even spiritual as in the case of offence
taken at Salman Rushdie, for example?

These "hate speech" measures in SA have been criticised on the
following basis.
1. The effect could be to chill freedom of expression: for instance, criticism
that the government is pandering to white interests, or drives out of pubic
discourse and into private chambers any reflection of black-against-white
racism. The Freedom of Expression Institute believes that hate speech should
be confronted openly through dialogue, not driven underground. Journalists
need to report freely on racial tensions in the society, it argues.

2. There is a fear that legislation may be used by government to silence
critics. For example, it could inhibit criticism of a Zimbabwe-style option
where racial redress has mainly benefited a small group of black people,
rather than advanced the position of black people in general.

4. South Africa already has hate speech legislation in the 1978 Bantu Administration
Act and elsewhere, which makes it an offence to incite hatred amongst the
races. This act was used under apartheid to prosecute people criticising
white supremacy, and to chill the political criticism voiced by newspapers.

Certainly, the present government - as committed to press freedom as it
is, has learnt fast to play the race card against the press. President Mandela
who not so long ago declared. "We have no whites or blacks, only South
Africans", has frequently hit out at black journalists for criticising
his racial reconciliation policy. Many other politicians in the ruling party
have denounced critical coverage - not on the merits or demerits of the
story - but on the fact that it originates from white journalists. In other
words, if you are white, your journalism is suspect, if you are black, you're
expected to be supportive.

What this suggests is that the big issue of race in South African reporting
is less about the legal setup - as important as this is, and more about
the political environment.
For journalists, this means treading a very shaky tightrope. But it also
means engaging in robust discussion. Nelson Mandela has said: "If black
journalists criticise us, then give us the right to criticise them. Freedom
of expression is not a monopoly of the press; it is a right of all of us."

He is right, of course, but journalists - for the sake of safety and for
the sake of the role of a pluralistic press in a democracy - need to stress
the special importance of freedom of the media, and freedom to debate exactly
whether race is a factor, and to what extent it is a convenient stick with
which to circumscribe journalists in this complex country.

There is, remarkably, one place where hate speech is not yet a point of
debate and discussion amongst South African journalists. This pertains not
to racism in regard to blacks and whites, or in regard to the various permutations
within the SA racial landscape. It concerns xenophobia against migrants
from other parts of Africa. With democratisation, South Africa has become
much more part of the continent, and minorities from all over sub-Saharan
Africa have come to Mandela's land of milk and honey in search of asylum
or economic survival or both. In some ways, South Africa has the potential
to benefit enormously from these waves of immigrants' talents and skills,
as has the USA over time. But this is not how things are seen in the broad
public or in the media.

That South Africa is now having to wrestle with this intolerance is a measure
of its normalisation in the world. We are still some way from sorting out
our own racial tolerance and reconciliation, and the role of journalists
therein, and we now face this new issue of a majority, as opposed to a minority,
practising a kind of racism against a group of "outsiders". These
are important challenges to overcome. But there is reason for optimism:
racism exists in South Africa, but it no longer rules.